Review: A ‘Rake’s Progress’ for a Fame-Hungry Internet Age

AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — “I wish I had money,” sings Tom Rakewell, the aimless protagonist of Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” which opened on Wednesday at the Aix Festival here. A satire of quests for fame and fortune, the piece seems in this staging more modern than ever. Many of its characters are, as the kids say, thirsty — desperately seeking the instant celebrity of our internet age.

Featuring a mostly American cast and directed by Simon McBurney of the theater company Complicite (“The Encounter”), this “Rake” is witty and visually striking, if musically uneven. A snazzy contemporary setting replaces the opera’s original 18th-century one, but the production is otherwise largely faithful to the libretto.

Stravinsky’s 1951 opera is written in a Neo-Classical style: Its music alludes to composers such as Mozart and Bach, but is nonetheless laced with pungent 20th-century dissonance, off-kilter rhythms and angular vocal lines. Sometimes Mr. McBurney’s production adopts this self-conscious fakeness. The singers are restricted to stylized gestures, and appear onstage in neatly symmetrical groupings. The opera’s happy opening scene between Tom and his girlfriend, Anne Trulove, plays out in front of flat projections of idyllic pastoral scenes, recalling the Hogarth engravings that served as the source for W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman’s libretto.

Michael Levine’s set is a white box whose walls are made of paper, suggesting that Tom is an empty page. A kind of modern Faust, he is soon tempted by Nick Shadow, a demonic figure who tears his way through the paper walls to claim that he brings Tom a great fortune, and to cart him off to London. Played by the bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen with verve and a black suit, Nick offers big-city slickness to the naïve Tom.

The tenor Paul Appleby (who has also sung the role at the Metropolitan Opera) embodied Tom’s eagerness and his blankness, singing with a sweet lyric tenor that easily projected in the large, mostly outdoor theater. But he was poorly supported by the Orchestre de Paris, conducted by Eivind Gullberg Jensen, whose muddy and imprecise performance, particularly in the first act, failed to complement Mr. Appleby’s rhythmic energy. (Mr. Jensen was a late replacement for the injured Daniel Harding.)

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Simon McBurney’s production features a mostly American cast, with a snazzy contemporary setting replacing the opera’s original 18th-century one.CreditPascal Victor/ArtComPress

Tom’s adventures in London society, more Dionysus than Dickens, get a flashy modern gloss here. With projections and a group of actors, including more tearing through walls, Mr. McBurney creates vivid vignettes of clubs, skyscrapers, a brothel (including the amusing Hilary Summers as the madam Mother Goose), a stock market crash and Tom’s medley of sexual partners (both women and men). The irony and sharp edges of Stravinsky’s score, as well as the humor of the madcap staging, keep us at a distance from the action, able to witness Tom’s downfall with a cool, critical eye.

But the soprano Julia Bullock, as Anne, gave the proceedings a beating heart. Though her voice was sometimes lost in the large theater and her high notes sometimes squeezed, Ms. Bullock made her saintly character sincere without being cloying. She was at her best in the haunting final scene, when her slim, nuanced soprano had a simple honesty.

At the insistence of Nick, Tom marries the bearded lady Baba the Turk, whose only asset is her fame. (The projections imply that Tom essentially does it for the Instagram possibilities.) The role of a hectoring sideshow attraction is not the opera’s most ingratiating element, but this production puts a twist on it. Though written for a mezzo-soprano, here the role is performed by the countertenor Andrew Watts in the spirit of Conchita Wurst or a “RuPaul’s Drag Race” runner-up, a funny and appropriately campy choice. (Mr. Watts, though, struggled with the role’s large range.)

Mr. McBurney’s targets may be on the obvious side, but the staging succeeds through its visual wit and sudden swerves into pathos. When Tom sits in front of his bed and sings “I wish I were happy,” the music is chilly and austere, and the white box surrounding Mr. Appleby seems to offer no comfort at all. As the auctioneer Sellem, the bald and spectacled Alan Oke bore some resemblance to Stravinsky, dispassionately selling off the 18th-century artifacts of Tom and Baba’s house — or relics from the warehouse of music past.

Despite its humor, everything in this production leads to death and loss. As Nick pushes Tom ever further down the path of debauchery, and eventually penury, the tears in the paper walls multiply. By the third act’s “Don Giovanni”-like graveyard scene, in which Tom plays a card game for his soul, the walls are scarred from his ordeals, implying both psychic damage and hard-won experience.

His voice underlined by a creepy harpsichord, Tom wins his soul, but Nick takes his mind. The final scene, in which Tom wanders through Bedlam, is acted with haunting economy by Mr. Appleby on bare stage.

The epilogue echoes “Don Giovanni” as well: The whole cast reminds the audience of the story’s moral, and warns against “idle hands and hearts and minds.” In other words, get off Twitter.

The Rake’s ProgressThrough July 18 at the Aix Festival; festival-aix.com.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C6 of the New York edition with the headline: A Tale for the Fame-Hungry Internet Age. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe